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March 2, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: 1
Samuel 16:10-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41
“Recovering
Sight: So Much Begins with a Word for It”
“Siloam,” where Jesus sends the blind man to
wash away the mud so he can see, means “sent” or “commissioned” – so it’s
perfect on this Sunday commissioning our VIM (Volunteers in Mission) Team to New
Orleans! We say, in a toast to Jesus technique of healing here, “Here’s mud in
your eye!” Here’s good old dirt, even Mississippi Delta dirt, mixed with
gentler moistures of saliva, spittle, and spit. Jesus is such a “hands on,”
touching and tactile healer! He’s not afraid to get down and dirty with us --
grounded in shared elementals. He’s a veritable “healer-dealer” in alchemies of
earth and water, body and spirit.
I told Julie I was going to compare dirt and
body, spirit and spit. She thought a minute and asked if I knew the difference
between “spirit” and “spit.” No, I said, what’s the difference? “I are!” Julie
said. Go ahead, you can groan, too. You live with certain persons long enough,
you become a “groan man!” Like Jesus -- so attuned – alive, alert, awake, aware
– to what and to whom the rest of us tend to pass by obliviously. It does not
seem to matter when or where Jesus is. Even when he is out taking his Sabbath
walk -- his day off, his time for “self-care” as we say -- he spots a blind man
begging by the side of the road. Just sitting there! Not crying out to Jesus,
as a more famous blind man does. This man does nothing to draw attention to
himself. He is not necessarily known as a person of faith. Nor does Jesus ask
him for any prior profession – of allegiance or of gratitude. Jesus risks
whatever repercussions to enter this stranger’s world.
This is a man of systemic blindness, a
man born into blindness. He never knew anything other than
blindness. Blindness is a given condition of his existence. It’s just like that
only more so for Helen Keller, in our Words for Meditation. She is systemically
blind, deaf, and necessarily dumb (in the sense of speechless). It seems we can
only speak what we can first see and can hear. There must be come setting, some
context to place a word in. Otherwise, we have no words for anything! Finally a
teacher, truly a “miracle-worker,” who will not take “no” for an answer, works
with the only sense Helen really has left to work with – the sense of touch. It
could be said touch is the only sense that cannot be taken from us. “Something
happened, and now I know, he touched me and made me whole.”
The miracle source for Helen is “living water” –
gushing over her one hand while her teacher finger-spells it again and again
onto the other. “On the other hand” comes the word! And the word is like “a
misty consciousness of something forgotten.” “Somehow the mystery of language
was revealed to me.” Finally, she has “a word” for it all! She beings to “make
sense” of her life! She can embrace her own consciousness – beginning to name
her reality for herself! You who go forth to New Orleans in the mission of
hurricane recovery this week, we pray for you such “mystery of language” – to
bear witness to realities named for you by those left just as much without voice
– and realities you see yourselves. We cannot wait to receive reports of your
“eyes to see” and your “ears to hear!”
So many of us as God’s children everywhere are
born into conditions far beyond our own making, our own controlling. We may,
like the blind man, consider it lucky that anyone even knows we are here! Can I
get a witness? Anyone ever so practiced in being invisible? Inaudible?
Incommunicable? Feeling so “out of it?” All of us disciples of Jesus practice
our own blindness. Maybe that lies in the nature of being “religious!” We have
to put on “blinders” to what we do not want to see – what does not fit with our
“system.” We prefer to render this man -- and anyone so systemically isolated
and ignored – as theoretical objects of utter indifference to us! The blind man
is someone for whom we need a category where we can place and contain him. We
need a label to place upon him, to justify his containment. Would we not prefer
to believe it is just inevitable? Some are bound to be born and kept forever
“out of our sight, out of our mind?”
So who is to blame for this man’s condition? we
ask Jesus so ingenuously. Someone must be guilty of causing what has happened.
We go after that anthropocentric archetype of “original sin” – preferring not to
notice the “original blessing” of the creation itself! Which act of creating
Jesus mimics with dirt and spit! So, who is to blame? we want to know. Who is
responsible? And Jesus, by deeds if not in so many words, answers us, I AM! I
am responsible – in the sense of being able to respond! WE are responsible –
for we can do something about this! No matter who he is. No matter where we
find him. No matter who he “belongs to.” If there is anything we can do for
him -- to change the conditions of his life and living -- to give him any more
options -- any more chances to discover the fullness of life intended for him --
as for any and all of God’s children -- If there is, then for God’s sake,
literally, says Jesus -- let’s say it! Let’s do it! For the only real sin is
not stuck some immutable place in the past but is “blind” refusal to receive
even now the fresh revelation of God’s future coming to be.
So let’s do what we have to do to give this guy
God’s future. But be forewarned: By giving this guy a future, we also risk
giving him a past! We risk confronting his full humanity – all those years when
we never even “saw” him there at all. Suddenly all us neighbors “catch on” to
who he is. After years of accepting him without even seeing him, as a given
part of our landscape, we neighbors seem horrified to think he won’t always just
“be there” for us! What will our world be like without him? The man who sits
there and begs? How can we afford to lose him? How will we know who we are –
if he is not there to remind us? At least we are not HIM! At least we can look
down on him, see ourselves “better” than him!
So why do we neighbors suddenly care so much
about this guy? Like we care what happens to someone we really never even knew
existed? Might it be – as with our awareness of people all over the world today
we never even knew were there – whose names we do not know, whose languages we
do not speak --that what is at stake is our whole worldview? Might that be the
truth of Katrina? That we have invested so much in our own personal and
corporate blindness? Most of us are kept so safe, so comfortable by contrast.
Let us ask ourselves just how “fixed”, how stable and how secure, we have always
assumed our world, and our places in it, would be. Do our neighbors now see
what we know in our own hearts? But dare not allow to consciousness, to
realities we then have to name?
Sisters and brothers, denial is not just some
river in Egypt! It is all around, among, between, and within us. We live by
denial. We die by denial. Not only this man’s neighbors but also his very own
parents want to deny what they have seen. How can it be so hard for us to see
and believe what is right in our faces? How hard for the powers that be in this
“old order” of things rudely passing away!
The powers of “church and state” depend on and
derive from such collaborative complacency, such conscious-or-not complicity
among all us “good” parents and “good” neighbors, “good” citizens and “good”
disciples. At heart, we ALL seem to need to deny with our whole being that any
such change of conditions, any such systemic change, even is possible! For what
might such “miracles” cost us?
Surely, if blindness can change to sight, if
begging can change to belonging – then what if war-making can change to
peace-making? What if weapons can change to words? What then? What kind of
fearful “new order” might that be? Does not our favorite psalm promise a table
set before us in the presence of our enemies? How would we who do war so well
know how to run such new world?
Well, I’m afraid we know what happens when we
cannot stand the message – what? We turn on the messenger! Surely this Jesus
is SO irresponsible under law – such a trouble maker, such a Sabbath-breaker –
that we are justified in denying HIM altogether! We want so desperately to
retreat into our blindness -- to go back and to cling to things as we thought
they were and would be forever. So suddenly we want this blind guy to be all on
our side and grateful for us! But the difference is, he has always known
he was blind. The whole system and all of us in it kept reinforcing how blind,
how begging, how belittled he was. While the rest of us thought we could
see! How dare we expect this guy to go back?
He is the one of “amazing grace, how sweet the
sound, that saved and set me free (Dr. King’s version). I once was lost but now
am found, was blind but now I see.” He may not know much about Jesus -- but he
knows all he needs to know! And he knows it because, like Helen Keller, he has
been taught to “see” for himself! He now knows “a word” about himself, a word
of grace and acceptance, recognition and restoration – a word so different from
all his years of invisibility, inaudibility – of the ignorance and isolation
where we placed and controlled him.
Do we “get it?” Jesus wants us to believe in him
by the changes in our own lives! By the new ways even WE may learn to see and
hear and to speak and to act!
This man knows he was blind, and now he can see
– and that is enough for him!
And anyone who helps us see – no matter
where or when – see even dimly, see through the mud in our eyes (Paul calls it
here the “murk” we once “groped” our way through! Talk about images of New
Orleans! Before we “came out” into the open! The bright light of Christ!) –
Anyone who helps us to catch just a passing glimpse of what we never have seen
before – that one must be a prophet! Which means, once we have “seen” we never
can “not see” again. Paul says all covers are ripped forever off all “shams” and
“frauds.” Even New Orleans rises to life!
If we get nothing else from confronting the
systemic blindness we share with this man born blind – both personally and
together -- let it be that we, like he, become the only “experts,” the only
“authorities” on who we are! All other authorities – parent figures, neighbor
figures, church figures, state figures -- are subject to what we now “see” for
ourselves. And we remain experts on how what we see may require us to act! – in
the way of following Jesus, of doing what Jesus would do. Let it be that we
will trust in our own experience -- so we may risk trusting each
other – forever true to the one in whose name, for whose sake, we now see. May
words of the poet Vachel Lindsey send us forth – to New Orleans and beyond!
Feel free to repeat the phrases with me – “I am unjust, / but I can strive for
justice. / My life is unkind, / but I can vote for kindness. / I, the
unloving, / say life should be lovely! / I that am blind, / cry out against my
blindness.” Amen.
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